


nota res mala optima

by malapropism



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Experimental Style, Gen, Vanishing Cabinets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 12:12:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7221865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malapropism/pseuds/malapropism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Montague falls through the Vanishing Cabinet, and he keeps falling, until his worst memory blooms into color.</p>
            </blockquote>





	nota res mala optima

**Author's Note:**

> **Content warnings:** This is generally a disturbing meditation on what it means to romanticize a villain, and on what it means for Montague to grow up in a violent household and join up with the Death Eaters. There are many _completely_ understandable reasons why that might make this story difficult to read, particularly if you are, for any reasons, sensitive to conversations about abuse victims perpetrating abuse later in life. (That isn't what this story is about, necessarily, but there's a kind of related meta-discussion in this story about the relationship between Montague's childhood and his actions later in life.) More specifically, there's discussion (and somewhat lyrically graphic depiction) of domestic violence, child abuse (i.e., being beaten), and the death of a parent. If you want more information on what that entails, head to the notes at the end.
> 
>  **Other notes:** To the best of my knowledge, Montague was never actually named "Graham" in the books - that's an addition of the movies, or the video games, I believe. I also do not think we were specifically told that he joined up with the Death Eaters; in my memory, the last we hear of him is when he's in the Inquisitorial Squad and gets pushed into the Vanishing Cabinet. I have imagined that he leaves Hogwarts after this year, and that he ends up as a foot soldier of sorts for the Death Eaters. Also, I know that a "Mr. and Mrs. Montague" show up to Hogwarts after Montague has been recovered in _Order of the Phoenix_ \- I have my own canon-compliant explanations/cheats for that, but also, you can just read this as canon-divergent.
> 
>  **The title:** Roughly translated, an evil thing known is best. (i.e., better the devil you know.) Common adage, taken from Erasmus. The flowers mentioned throughout the story are (to the best of my knowledge) native to Cumbria, where Montague's family is (in my imagining) from.

Here is the thing about monsters. They are what they are: nothing more and nothing less. They make no apologies and they expect no kindnesses. Gleaming, they bare their teeth and themselves. A monster needs no mask: that is the point. A monster cannot lie.

Here is the thing about humans. They always wear a mask, even as they bare their throats. 

Here is the thing about life. There will be humans who are themselves so monstrous, you cannot imagine a drop of red blood runs in their veins. There will be humans who cry (and it is a mask) and humans who smile (and it is a mask) and humans who kiss (and it is a mask). There will be men who call themselves monsters and there will be monsters who call themselves men, and you will have to learn the difference, or else you will be eaten whole. Or else they will pick the meat off your bones and suck the skin dry. Or else they will turn you into a monster of their own making.

Here is the thing about you. You are not the hero of this story, and that is fine, because “hero” is just another mask we sometimes wear. You are a boy, and then you are a man, and then you become a monster, although not necessarily in this order, not necessarily like that at all. This is the story: you become a monster because it is the mask that suits you best, and because you have forgotten how to be anything but, and because it seemed like a way to stay alive. You know too well that there are monsters who call themselves men, you know the feel of their fingers around your throat and you will know the taste of their blood on your teeth. You know what it means to have a pulse, and you know that it is a weakness. 

And so you will choose to forget that you are human, and you will think yourself a monster, a god. There will be some who absolve you because of this: because you forgot, because you could not be helped (and were not helped). There will be some who will love you because of this: because you fashioned yourself a monster, and the monster was ruinous, and that was beautiful, and oh how we do love a good monster.

And so you will be absolved and loved by many. They will remember your name. Or, perhaps not _your_  name, because it is but a footnote to the story, but they will remember the names of the monsters you followed.

In the end, you were not particularly important and in fact you have but half a name to remember, which makes it easy to forget and to forgive. You were just a boy, after all. You were beset by monsters, and you grew claws to protect yourself, and you sprouted horns to defend yourself, and you spilt blood to prove yourself, and you sang out curses to remind yourself, _I am one of them_. 

They will absolve you, they will love you, after all, after it all.

I will not.

Here is the thing about life. There is a difference between a monster and a man, between a boy and a bludgeon, and most of us live in that difference. The man-made-monster-made-god is a fairy tale: it is the story we tell ourselves when it hurts too much to remember that there is no such thing as a manmade monster. There are only mortals in masks telling stories in the dark.

_But wait,_ you say. _You said that there were monsters who called themselves men. You said that I become a monster._  

I did.

_So_ , you say. _They exist, they do, and sometimes they call themselves men, but they aren’t men, and I became one, I was a monster, I was a god, I was absolved and I was loved._

I said those things. And there are some who absolve you, who love you, who tell stories about you that have easy endings.

But here’s another thing about humans: they lie. And I am so very, very human.

 

* * *

 

The past gnashed its horrible teeth and chewed him down to the bone and swallowed him up whole, and inside the belly of the beast it was dark and he was alone. For the better part of two days, Montague was trapped between the past and the present, and snatches of life beyond the walls of the Vanishing Cabinet filtered into his thoughts but mostly nothing felt real at all.

Montague remembered hands at his back and the headlong rush of falling, head over feet, endless and beyond time. He did not remember landing, but at some point he had, because he was no longer falling but also he no longer had a body. When he looked down at his hands, they were no longer there and when he reached for his legs they were no longer there. He stared out of eyes that were no longer there into the darkness that was all there was.

He was naked and he was without a body and he was there but he was not there, he was nowhere and suddenly, there was color and light and he was seven years old again and it was his birthday.

Time bent around him and there were no shadows.

He is seven-years-old but also sixteen-years-old but also eleven-years-old but also a heartbeat away from being born, but also a lifetime beyond the grave. Dead and alive and dead again, dead before he could even be born and born before he could ever live. He is a boy running wild toward the forest, away from the outskirts of Penrith, away from the cottage with the cracked copper pipes and the garden of broken glass, broken bottles that cut your feet as you run, run, run away. Away from the man with rot on his breath, with florid pink skin that went white around the knuckles before it went purple like bruised fruit rotting on the vine. Away from the body that was a mother that was a home that was a hope. Away from the stubborn sprouting wildflowers, the red clover and the oxeyes that insist on blooming, even and ever here, only to be trampled and ground into pulp.

The memory hurtles into focus and Montague is split in two, at once a seven-year-old boy watching his father’s hands turn pink (like bistort) turn white (like meadowsfeet) turn purple (like betony) ‘round his mother’s swan-neck and a sixteen-year-old pretending to be a man pretending to be a monster.

The birthday party - the day his mother died - played out in an endless, inevitable loop, projected onto the dimensionless depths of whatever was inside the broken cabinet, which might have contained all of time and space, or hell itself, or some such horror unimaginable, who could say. He imagined that this feeling - the rip of his soul, the way he shook from a desire to be whole, to be real, to be in one place, to be _not here_  - was what drove him running into the Fells that day, crushing the spiky selfheal flowers with his feet. There is blood on his teeth (it is his own) and blood on his hands (it is not). There is one - no, _two_ bodies behind him and they are already blooming, and he is not seven-years-old, he is not a boy anymore, he is not whole anymore. He is sixteen-years-old and he is retribution and he is kingdom come. He is shaking and he is not the hero of his own story. This is not his story and this is not the truth anymore. 

 

* * *

 

An aside:

The truth, such as it is and such that we may tell: A woman did die that day, her last breath caught between the hands of a man who’d promised to love her ’til the end of time. A boy did run that day, blood staining the soles of his feet and filling the gaps of his broken teeth. But only one body lay to rot, to return to the earth, to come up in the loam as melancholy thistle and lady’s-mantle and rough hawkbit. The other body ran after the boy, his feet rough and the skin thick, untroubled by broken things. He caught up to the boy and drug him back, drug him home through the dirt. And life continued on, as it so often does in homes with cracked copper pipes and dark shadows in the hall and silent sleeping screams. Four years passed and the boy got out, and he thought he knew what the word _monster_  meant _,_ and he thought he knew how to get free.

And here we end the story, if we want to tell a story that makes it easy to absolve him, to love him. It is easier to end the story here - _a boy on the run from a monster_ \- and to let the audience draw its conclusion - _a boy without a choice, he became what he knew_ \- than to continue in the telling. It is neater, cleaner, simpler to leave it here. But here is the thing about life: it is never neat, clean, or simple. It is hard. It is bloody. It is messy. And it continues, without resolution, until it breaks off mid-sentence, and simply ceases to be.

The hard, bloody, messy truth is the one that we must swallow but it does not go down easy: this boy got a choice, and so many do not, but this one did and he made it. 

It’s easier when there’s _cause and effect_ , when there’s _foreshadowing_ , when you know where to assign the blame. “He became a monster because he was raised by wolves,” we say, forgetting that there are boys who become wolves who were not raised by monsters. Forgetting that there are girls who hear the voice of the devil in their mind and come out the other side, scarred but whole, hardened but human. Forgetting that there are children who watch their parents writhe and twist and burn with pain, pain beyond belief, pain beyond imagining, who grow up and learn how to be brave so that they may be of use. Forgetting that there was a boy who lived in a cupboard under the stairs who was often brittle and spiteful and angry, as most boys are, but who was also ready to die for the world that he loved.

It’s easier to say, “Montague joined the Death Eaters because of what happened to him, because of what he saw,” because that’s the story that lets us love him and absolve ourselves for it, because it’s easier to imagine that evil is what makes a monster and that monsters are not men. It’s easier to imagine that there are no contradictions and that everyone can be forgiven and that everything can be explained. 

But it is true to say, “Montague joined the Death Eaters, and maybe it was because his father wrapped his fingers around his mother’s throat until she could not even choke out the word _please_ , and maybe it was because his father beat him senseless, and maybe when we say _senseless_ we mean _desensitized._ Maybe Montague joined the Death Eaters because he knew the taste of blood but maybe he joined because he liked it. Maybe he joined because he wanted power and maybe he joined because he felt like he had no other choice, but he did. He had a choice, and he made it, and maybe it was for this reason or that reason, or maybe it was because he was sixteen-years-old and afraid that someone would take the world away from him. Maybe it was for all of these reasons or none of them but still: he did it."

Here is the thing about life and about people and about stories. Life is never easy. People are rarely one thing or the other. And stories are as much about what is unsaid as they are about what is said. 

Montague is seven-years-old and he is running for his life from a monster of a man. Montague is fourteen-years-old and he is pulling Katie Bell off her broom and he is laughing. Montague is sixteen-years-old and he is shining his Inquisitorial Squad badge and he is flush with pride and power. Montague is seventeen-years-old and he is following orders. Montague is eighteen-years-old and he is fighting to kill.

Here is the thing about Montague: he is a victim and he is an abuser, all at once, and those are two threads of the same story. This is a truth for many of us and we would do well to remember it.

 

* * *

 

The Vanishing Cabinet was one of a pair, and it once had a purpose, and it will again. But for now, it was broken, a gate to a path with no destination and no end in sight. Just that endless, empty space between past and present, here and there, memory and fiction, truth and reality. Everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere. A contradiction, a paradox. The worst of his life, in an endless and inevitable loop. Enough to make a boy go mad, and he does, he does and he does and he - 

wants to be _whole_ , he wants to be _real_ , he wants to be _one._ Montague imagines that this feeling is what keeps the body together as you Apparate, when you are hurtling through the universe with a faint _pop_  -

\- and you are free, you are safe, you are _not here_ , and you are whole, so long as you have not left something precious behind.

****  


**Author's Note:**

>  **Specific explanation of the content warning:** I briefly describe Montague's father strangling his mother to death. It isn't a particularly "graphic" depiction, but it is explicit. I also mention that Montague was physically beaten by his father, but I do not describe it. This primarily takes place between "Time bent around him and there were no shadows." and "An aside:", but it's referenced again post-"An aside:".


End file.
